Page 58 of Texas Glory
“It’s yours,” he said gruffly. “Along with the other one. Just don’t thank me for them. Should have put books in here a long time back. Not much point in having shelves if you don’t put books on them.”
“That’s what I thought the first time I saw this room. I fell in love with it.”
He snapped his head up and stared at her, his eyes incredibly dark.
“I thought—” She cleared her throat. “I thought these shelves might hold a thousand books.”
He leaned back in his chair. “A thousand?”
She nodded. “Or more.”
“Let me know what the tally is when you get the shelves filled up.” He went back to writing in his ledgers.
Holding the book tightly, she began to walk across the room, then she stopped. The room was quiet except for the occasional scratch of his pen across the paper.
“I used to read to my mother before she died,” she said softly.
He lifted his head and looked at her.
“I miss reading to her,” she added. “I miss her.”
He propped his elbow on the desk and rubbed his thumb and forefinger over his mustache. She remembered its softness as he had kissed her.
“Dr. Freeman mentioned something about your mother being an invalid.”
She had never spoken the words. After all these years, acknowledging the truth was still painful. “She and my father had an argument. In the scuffle, she lost her balance and fell down the stairs. She couldn’t move after that, but she wasn’t dead. So I cared for her.”
“The scuffle? You mean your father struck her?”
She nodded, wishing she’d kept the incident locked away. It sounded incredibly ugly spoken aloud. Had he risen from his chair, had he come toward her, she thought she might have taken flight and rushed back to her room.
Instead, he remained perfectly still. “No matter how angry I get, Dee, I would never hit you. I give you my word on that.”
Filled with conviction, the quietly spoken words left her no choice but to believe him.
“Can I read to you?” she asked.
She almost laughed at the startled expression that crossed his features, as though she had spoken the very last words he had ever expected to hear. He looked as though she’d thrown a bucket of cold water on him.
“I know you don’t have a lot of spare time. I could read while you work on your ledgers.”
As though unable to determine her motive, he nodded slowly. “That’d be fine.”
She set the lamp on a small table and sat in the stuffed chair beside it. Bringing up her feet, she tucked them beneath her. She felt him watching her and tried not to be bothered by his scrutiny.
She turned back the cover and several pages before clearing her throat. “ ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …’ ”
She glanced up. His pen was poised above the ledger, his ink dripping onto the paper.
“Can you work while I read?” she asked.
He nodded and dipped the pen into the inkwell again. When he began to write in his ledgers, she filled the shadowed room with the story.
Dallas wasn’t certain of the exact moment when his wife had come to regret her decision to read to him, but he thought it might have been sometime after midnight.
Her eyes had been drifting closed, her words becoming softer, less frequent. He had asked her if she wanted to go to bed. She’d snapped her head up and claimed she wasn’t tired.
He figured she just didn’t know how to stop reading and announce she was going to bed without leaving the door open for him to join her.
